A Son of the Rock

Millenium, 1997. 289p

Due to Human Interface Technology, HIT, people known as Watchers can pay to experience the lives of others via head implants. Unlike with run of the mill plants, though, Adrien Reyes’s Watcher, known as C, can talk back to him. Adrien suffers a near fatal beating while on an errand for C to try to procure an improved version of the interface, called only I, which leads to him linking up with a Croatian woman, Sabina. When C disrupts their growing relationship by taking Adrien over at an inopportune moment, so scaring Sabina off, Adrien resolves to rid himself of his plant. He returns to the US to achieve this.

As a result C instead fixes his designs on Sabina – who has become interested in the experience of being watched – and utilises another of his watched, Tomaj, to entice her to him. Meanwhile, the shadowy figure of Max wishes to gain I for himself as a means of accessing the Deep, the environment where HIT becomes more of a mixing of minds.

Thereafter we move more into thriller territory as the novel runs to its denouement and Adrien seeks to protect Sabina from the forces surrounding her.

I’m not moved to seek out more of Sullivan’s work after reading this but it is an unusual – intermittently violent – telling of what is, in the end, a love story.